Tiers to avoid tears.

We have dove down to learn more about differentiation in class.

I could not be more excited to get more in depth into it!

In class today, we talked all about tiering.

Get a mental image of something that's tiered..

source

Okay, maybe that helped give you a "tiered" idea.

(p.s: i wouldn't hate it if someone made me a cake like this.)

Back to tiering in the educational sense, though.

Tiering has to do with having a tiered (or layered) curriculum to help differentiate in lessons/activties.

We know that if you teach a lesson one way, it isn't going to reach all students.

It may be too low for them, too high for them, not connecting to them, too boring for them.

We need the perfect fit for every student to be able to succeed.

This is where the tiered planning comes into play.

We know that there are different ways to differentiate;
therefore, the tiers can be altered based off different things.

However, we did learn that tiering is only necessary and used for
differentiating readiness.

When tiering there are many things that you can adjust, though, such as:

- level of complexity

- amount of structures

- materials

- time/pace

-number of steps

- form of expression

- level of dependence

The last thing you want in your classroom is for students to break down in tears

(hence the title of the post) over being overwhelmed by a lesson/activity.

Nothing will be learned if they are not in their zone of proximal development.

Therefore, it is so important to plan out this differentiation for the students.

One content area can be covered in different tiers to reach all students accurately.

There was a graphic I found that I really thought showed how to plan a tiered activity well.

source

I feel that the flow chart above just gave me that much more support to understanding tiers.

Hopefully it is beneficial to you too in understanding how to plan tiered activities.

Tiering is essential, it really really is.

You have to make fair lessons/activities that all students will benefit from,

and tiering enables you to lay it all out and differentiate easily.

Get familiar with it, because it must be used in the class to be successful!

- Mallory